New Chinatown museum spotlights Chinese LGBTQ art and identity

Hundreds of people filled Chinatown on May 29 as the Out Museum cut rainbow ribbons and opened what organizers describe as the world’s first Chinese queer museum. Mayor Daniel Lurie joined community members and city officials for the ceremony, giving the opening a civic stamp that matched its cultural ambition.

The museum’s arrival carries unusual weight because it sits inside the neighborhood that has long anchored Chinese American life in San Francisco. The Out Museum is not just adding another gallery to the city’s arts map. It is putting Chinese LGBTQ memory, art and identity in the same public space as Chinatown’s immigrant history, in a place where those stories have too often been told separately.

At the center of the project is Xiangqi Chen, an artist and LGBTQ activist who began shaping the museum concept in 2020 while trapped in her Shanghai apartment during the pandemic. Chen had already spent more than two decades pushing for queer visibility in China, and she first came to Chinatown in 2012 as a visiting artist with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. After later ties to San Francisco’s Chinese American arts community through the Asian Art Museum and a residency at the Chinese Culture Center, the idea moved from sketch to temporary prototype in Ross Alley in 2024 and then to a semi-permanent Chinatown home.

The museum opened at a symbolic moment, at the end of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and just before Pride Month. Its inaugural show, The Ongoing: Mapping the Chinese LGBTQ Community, featured five artists and interactive elements, with work spanning photography, porcelain sculpture and installation. That mix makes the museum feel less like a static display case than a community archive, one built to gather stories that have often been scattered across cities, generations and languages.

The Chinese Culture Center, founded in 1965 during the civil rights movement as a response to racism and displacement, has long framed Chinatown as a place where immigrant, BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ voices can be centered rather than translated away. At the opening, Abby Chen, a curator at the Asian Art Museum, said, “We have always been here.” Helen Zia also attended and praised Xiangqi Chen as one of the most courageous people she knows, underscoring how the museum is being read not as a novelty, but as recognition.

One exhibit includes a suitcase of photographs of Chinese queer people hiding their faces, inspired by a 1970s story about a gay immigrant who found refuge in Chinatown despite the neighborhood’s conservative reputation. That image links the museum’s present-day opening to a longer San Francisco history of refuge, concealment and self-definition, now brought into the open on Clay Street and in the public life of Chinatown.